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VI
THE FIRST WORLD WAR was a great psychic shock to a
Europe that had known many years of peace. The subsequent
blood-letting removed France and England from the scene as
world powers. As Pound has often pointed out, it also broke up a
process that had been continuously at work since the dissolution of
the Holy Roman Empire. A young, bewildered and pathetically
ill-prepared America emerged as the heir of Western civilization,
as so often happens after a regicide.
Pound also was deeply shocked by the war. Never again would
he be content to be merely an artist. In a brief autobiography prefixed
to the New Directions volume of Selected Poems (1949), he
stated that "In 1918 began investigation of causes of war, to
oppose same."
The English writers and artists, almost to a man, rushed into
the fray. Pound remained in London, for American sentiment,
we should remember, remained equally balanced between pro-
German and pro-British sympathies, until George Sylvester
Viereck's inept pro-German propaganda pushed the Americans
into the British camp.
Wyndham Lewis, seriously ill with septicemia, had to wait
nearly a year before he was sufficiently recovered to go off to
the slaughter. Ford enlisted, after a farewell party given for him
at South Lodge that ended badly.
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